The Girl from Sunset Ranch by AMY BELL MARLOWE (best ereader for manga .TXT) 📖

sun can he be?"

[Illustration: "HELEN CREPT ON HANDS AND KNEES TO THE EDGE OF THE BLUFF." (Page 14)]

She was sure the rider of the buckskin was no Sunset puncher. Yet he seemed garbed in the usual chaps, sombrero, flannel shirt and gay neckerchief of the cowpuncher.

"And there isn't another band of cattle nearer than Froghole," thought the girl, adjusting her body to the Rose pony's quickened gait.

She did not know it, but she was quite as much an object of interest to the strange rider as he was to her. And it was worth while watching Helen Morrell ride a pony.

The deep brown of her cheek was relieved by a glow of healthful red. Her thick plaits of hair were really sunburned; her thick eyebrows were startlingly light compared with her complexion.

Her eyes were dark gray, with little golden lights playing in them; they seemed fairly to twinkle when she laughed. Her lips were as red as ripe sumac berries; her nose, straight, long, and generously moulded, was really her handsomest feature, for of course her hair covered her dainty ears more or less.

From the rolling collar of her blouse her neck rose firm and solid--as strong-looking as a boy's. She was plump of body, with good shoulders, a well-developed arm, and her ornamented russet riding boots, with a tiny silver spur in each heel, covered very pretty and very small feet.

Her hand, if plump, was small, too; but the gauntlets she wore made it seem larger and more mannish than it was. She rode as though she were a part of the pony.

She had urged on the strawberry roan and now came out upon the open plateau at the top of the bluff just as the buckskin mounted to the same level from the other side.

The rock called "the View" was nearer to the stranger than to herself. It overhung the very steepest drop of the eminence.

Helen touched Rose with the spur, and the pony whisked her tail and shot across the uneven sward toward the big boulder where Helen and her father had so often stood to survey the rolling acres of Sunset Ranch.

Whether the stranger on the buckskin thought her mount had bolted with her, Helen did not know. But she heard him cry out, saw him swing his hat, and the buckskin started on a hard gallop along the verge of the precipice toward the very goal for which the Rose pony was headed.

"The foolish fellow! He'll be killed!" gasped Helen, in sudden fright. "That soil there crumbles like cheese! There! He's down!"

She saw the buckskin's forefoot sink. The brute stumbled and rolled over--fortunately for the pony away from the cliff's edge.

But the buckskin's rider was hurled into the air. He sprawled forward like a frog diving and--without touching the ground--passed over the brink of the precipice and disappeared from Helen's startled gaze.

CHAPTER II (DUDLEY STONE)

 

The victim of the accident made no sound. No scream rose from the depths after he disappeared. The buckskin pony rolled over, scrambled to its feet, and cantered off across the plateau.

Helen Morrell had swerved her own mount farther to the south and came to the edge of the caved-in bit of bank with a rush of hoofs that ended in a wild scramble as she bore down upon the Rose pony's bit.

She was out of her saddle, and had flung the reins over Rose's head, on the instant. The well-trained pony stood like a rock.

The girl, her heart beating tumultuously, crept on hands and knees to the crumbling edge of the bluff.

She knew its scarred face well. There were outcropping boulders, gravel pits, ledges of shale, brush clumps and a few ragged trees clinging tenaciously to the water-worn gullies.

She expected to see the man crushed and bleeding on some rock below. Perhaps he had rolled clear to the bottom.

But as her swift gaze searched the face of the bluff, there was no rock, splotched with red, in her line of vision. Then she saw something in the top of one of the trees, far down.

It was the yellow handkerchief which the stranger had worn. It fluttered in the evening breeze like a flag of distress.

"E-e-e-yow!" cried Helen, making a horn of her hands as she leaned over the edge of the precipice, and uttering the puncher's signal call.

"E-e-e-yow!" came up a faint reply.

She saw the green top of the tree stir. Then a face--scratched and streaked with blood--appeared.

"For the love of heaven!" called a thin voice. "Get somebody with a rope. I've got to have some help."

"I have a rope right here. Pass it under your arms, and I'll swing you out of that tree-top," replied Helen, promptly.

She jumped up and went to the pony. Her rope--she would no more think of traveling without it than would one of the Sunset punchers--was coiled at the saddlebow.

Running back to the verge of the bluff she planted her feet on a firm boulder and dropped the coil into the depths. In a moment it was in the hands of the man below.

"Over your head and shoulders!" she cried.

"You can never hold me!" he called back, faintly.

"You do as you're told!" she returned, in a severe tone. "I'll hold you--don't you fear."

She had already looped her end of the rope over the limb of a tree that stood rooted upon the brink of the bluff. With such a purchase she would be able to hold all the rope itself would hold.

"Ready!" she called down to him.

"All right! Here I swing!" was the reply.

Leaning over the brink, rather breathless, it must be confessed, the girl from Sunset Ranch saw him swing out of the top of the tree.

The tree-top was all of seventy feet from its roots. If he slipped now he would suffer a fall that surely would kill him.

But he was able to help himself. Although he crashed once against the side of the bluff and set a bushel of gravel rattling down, in a moment he gained foothold on a ledge. There he stood, wavering until she paid off a little of the line. Then he dropped down to get his breath.

"Are you safe?" she shouted down to him.

"Sure! I can sit here all night."

"You don't want to, I suppose?" she asked.

"Not so's you'd notice it. I guess I can get down after a fashion."

"Hurt bad?"

"It's my foot, mostly--right foot. I believe it's sprained, or broken. It's sort of in the way when I move about."

"Your face looks as if that tree had combed it some," commented Helen.

"Never mind," replied the youth. "Beauty's only skin deep, at best. And I'm not proud."

She could not see him very well, for the sun had dropped so low that down where he lay the face of the bluff was in shadow.

"Well, what are you going to do? Climb up, or down?"

"I believe getting down would be easier--'specially if you let me use your rope."

"Sure!"

"But then, there'd be my pony. I couldn't get him with this foot----"

"I'll catch him. My Rose can run down anything on four legs in these parts," declared the girl, briskly.

"And can you get down here to the foot of this cliff where I'm bound to land?"

"Yes. I know the way in the dark. Got matches?"

"Yes."

"Then you build some kind of a smudge when you reach the bottom. That'll show me where you are. Now I'm going to drop the rope to you. Look out it doesn't get tangled."

"All right! Let 'er come!"

"I'll have to leave you if I'm to catch that buckskin before it gets dark, stranger. You'll get along all right?" she added.

"Surest thing you know!"

She dropped the rope. He gathered it in quickly and then uttered a cheerful shout.

"All clear?" asked Helen.

"Don't worry about me. I'm all right," he assured her.

Helen leaped back to her waiting pony. Already the golden light was dying out of the sky. Up here in the foothills the "evening died hard" as the saying is; but the buckskin pony had romped clear across the plateau. He was now, indeed, out of sight.

She whirled Rose about and set off at a gallop after the runaway. It was not until then that she remembered she had no rope. That buckskin would have to be fairly run down. There would be no roping him.

"But if you can't do it, no other horsie can," she said, aloud, patting the Rose pony on her arching neck. "Go it, girl! Let's see if we can't beat any miserable little buckskin that ever came into this country. A strawberry roan forever!"

Her "E-e-e-yow! yow!" awoke the pony to desperate endeavor. She seemed to merely skim the dry grass of the open plateau, and in ten minutes Helen saw a riderless mount plunging up the side of a coulée far ahead.

"There he goes!" cried the girl. "After him, Rosie! Make your pretty hoofs fly!"

The excitement of the chase roused in Helen that feeling of freedom and confidence that is a part of life on the plains. Those who live much in the open air, and especially in the saddle, seldom think of failure.

She knew she was going to catch the runaway pony. Such an idea as non-success never entered her mind. This was the first hard riding she had done since Mr. Morrell died; and now her thoughts expanded and she shook off the hopeless feeling which had clouded her young heart and mind since they had buried her father.

While she rode on, and rode hard, after the fleeing buckskin her revived thought kept time with the pony's hoofbeats.

No longer did the old tune run in her head: "If I only could clear dad's name!" Instead the drum of confidence beat a charge to arms: "I know I can clear his name!

"To think of poor dad living out here all these years, with suspicion resting on his reputation back there in New York. And he wasn't guilty! It was that partner of his, or that bookkeeper, who was guilty. That is the secret of it," Helen told herself.

"I'll go back East and find out all about it," determined the girl, as her pony carried her swiftly over the ground. "Up, Rose! There he is! Don't let him get away from us!"

Her interest in the chase of the buckskin pony and in the mystery of her father's trouble ran side by side.

"On, on!" she urged Rose. "Why shouldn't I go East? Big Hen can run the ranch well enough. And there are my cousins--and auntie. If Aunt Eunice resembles mother----

"Go it, Rose! There's our quarry!"

She stooped forward in the saddle, and as the Rose pony, running like the wind, passed the now staggering buckskin, Helen snatched the dragging rein, and pulled the runaway around to follow in her own wake.

"Hush, now! Easy!" she commanded her mount, who obeyed her voice quite as well as though she had tugged at the reins. "Now we'll go back quietly and trail this useless one along with us.

"Come up, Buck! Easy, Rose!" So she urged them into the same gait, returning in a wide circle toward the path up which she had climbed before the sun went down--the trail to Sunset Ranch.

"Yes! I can do it!" she cried, thinking aloud. "I can and will go to New York. I'll find out all